Themed collection 2025 Pioneering Investigators

This review summarizes recent advances in utilizing emerging functional organic macrocycles and cages to exploit spatial confinement and cooperative noncovalent interactions, enabling the development of efficient supramolecular catalysis systems.

Herein, we systematically elaborate on the foundational principles, design methodologies, and diverse applications of in vivo CRISPR biosensing.

The integration of the surface-functionalized nanomaterials with dynamic interfacial crosslinks enables the fabrications of versatile dynamic nanocomposite hydrogels (DNCHs) with tunable structures, properties, and functionalities.

The catalytic redox-neutral carboxylation of readily accessible starting materials with CO₂ leads to valuable carboxylic acids with high atom economy and selectivity. In this review, we summarize the latest developments and challenges in this field.

Hydrogen-bonding enables exquisite control over supramolecular polymerization of π-conjugated systems, finely modulating their kinetics, thermodynamics, molecular packing, morphology, and functional properties.

This review provides a comprehensive overview of design principles and clinical applications of chemical tools for recognizing, discriminating, and enriching single nucleotide variants.

This review summarizes the design principles, activation mechanisms, and applications of stimuli-activatable covalent probes for protein labeling. It also presents challenges and perspectives on advancing these probes toward clinical translation.

Photoactivated nanovaccines enhance immune responses through light-controlled antigen release and phototherapy-induced ICD for cancer and infection treatment.

This review offers a comprehensive overview of electrochemical devices enabled by multi-ion carriers, highlighting synergistic ion transport, interfacial stabilization, and hybrid redox mechanisms that overcome single-ion system limitations.

This review summarizes advances in small-molecule photoacoustic probes, detailing their design, properties, and applications in detecting key bioactive species, and highlights challenges and future directions for molecular imaging development.

The key progress in the field of N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) organocatalysis during the period of 2015 to 2024 is systematically summarized and discussed in this review.

The application of polymer materials in high-energy-density lithium-ion batteries.

This review highlights the recent advances in single- and multi-modal molecular probes with NIR-II activatable optical signals for disease diagnosis and theranostics.

Direct functionalization of unactivated alkenes via visible-light photocatalysis has emerged as a highly effective strategy for the rapid construction of multi-functional, complex molecular architectures from simple, abundant chemicals.

We review structurally authenticated metal(loid) bis(trimethylsilyl)phosphide complexes, highlighting how their solid-state structures and electronic structures differ from those containing the related bis(trimethylsilyl)amide ligand.

Precision medicine is aimed at achieving a more personalized approach tailored to individual characteristics and urgently necessitates the development of precise diagnostic and therapeutic methods.

Curium is an artificial transuranic element with atomic number 96.

We discuss recent advances in photo-responsive theranostic nanoplatforms for dental disease management and evaluate their mechanisms, performance and future design principles.

A tutorial review on customizing the particle swarm optimization algorithm for chemically relevant problems.

This tutorial serves as an accessible introduction for researchers and students interested in the multifaceted chemistry of formaldehyde and its potential in shaping a more sustainable future.

This Tutorial Review provides an introduction to the field of porous frameworks assembled through directional noncovalent interactions. In it we suggest a coherent naming system for these materials and propose standards for their characterisation.

This review highlights ligand relay catalysis, a strategy that employs dynamic ligand exchange to circumvent the limitations of single-ligand systems, thereby enabling superior reactivity, selectivity, and novel transformations.

This review summarizes proton, water, and oxygen transport in ionomers of PEMFCs and highlights design strategies to optimize the three-phase boundary, enhancing mass transport, performance, and future prospects.